Monday, November 07 2016

I recently purchased a Mediatek MTK8382 tablet to keep around the office
for ancillary functions related to my work, things like scheduling, time
tracking, messaging, and so on. It seemed a reasonable enough risk to
take, those functions being also available to my workstation and Android
phone...

"SD card suddenly removed...", "Unfortunately,
<app> has stopped..." came with increasing frequency and
eventually left the thing useless. I tried all of the usual fixes, from
factory reset to uninstall/reinstall of every balky app, and finally
found The One True Solution: I pulverized the piece of garbage with a
sledgehammer, rendering it completely crash-proof.

Saturday, October 03 2015

I created it using AnyMote's "Learn Remote" feature and the
factory original remote, then set up the button layout to match that of
the factory plastic piece. I changed a few of the buttons to show icons
rather than text, but that's easily enough changed if you want to have
just text on the button labels.

Friday, August 21 2015

If you're running Debian 8.1 "Jessie" and are a Hulu
subscriber, you've probably just received a nasty surprise — the
new Hulu DRM will hit you with an error that starts with
"One time loading experience to make the rest of your life
better" and then an error code. No movie. No joy. If
that's what a better life looks like, I'll be quite content to stick to
the not-better life I've already got, thank you very much.

I was just about to tell Hulu to take a flying... and go back to
Netflix, but I haven't yet found the secret sauce that will enable HTML5
video to make sound on my system. I decided to defuckerize Hulu instead,
and though it's a purely evil hack it seems so far to be working just
fine. Here's what I did on my AMD64 workstation:

DISCLAIMER: Following the instructions that follow
might cause all manner of horrible things to happen to your computer.
Proceed at your own risk.

First, make sure that your system backups are current, safe, and within
easy reach just in case things go very badly. Then:

You may need some development libraries in order to successfully make
and install hal-info — being a developer I've got scads
of -dev stuff already and didn't run into any problems. If you run into
a glitch, you'll probably have to STFW for the solution. Please don't
ask me for help unless you've got a credit card and will be happy to pay
my exorbitant hourly rate.

First things first: Extract the hal-info archive, configure, make, and
install it. It'll complain that you don't have a great enough version of
HAL installed, but you can safely ignore that warning because at the
moment you don't have any HAL at all installed.

That'll keep APT from crying about the missing dependency on hal-info
when you install the downloaded hal.

Then, as root, and in the directory into which you've stored all of
those heinous Ubuntu .deb files:

dpkg -i libhal1_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-dev_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-storage1_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-storage-dev_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i hal_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

Assuming nothing caught fire, exploded, or leaked out of your computer,
you can reinit or reboot your machine and try viewing a Hulu video. It
might work. It did for me.

For The Record: I always advise very strongly against installing Ubuntu
packages on Debian systems, but in this case I ignored my own advice and
got lucky. There's no way I'd install a full, real HAL from source
because it would very likely hose up a modern Debian system — HAL
has always sucked almost as badly as Flash, which I suppose is why Adobe
chose to make DRM in Flash depend upon HAL in the first place.

If you give this a shot, please leave a comment below with a few
pertinent details about your system and whether or not it worked.

Thursday, May 14 2015

As you may be aware, and certainly are if you have reason to be, I am
somewhat fanatical about information security. It's a habit that's been
with me for just about 35 years now, so it has become second nature.
I was thinking just a few minutes ago about a hole in my security
practices that requires an unconventional approach to remediation, and
the result is here.

If you have reason to be concerned about the security of data that you
own that I store for you, you might wish to periodically look in on
that file and verify its cryptographic signature. If you don't have my
public key, it's here. It would be
a good idea to grab it long before you need it, and to rely upon it
only if you've independently verified its validity — perhaps by
talking about it on the telephone with me.

Saturday, July 26 2014

I'm big on keeping my world in order. I want my email inbox to be empty
every time I finish processing my mail, and I want all of my upcoming
tasks to be committed to some trustworthy application that will keep
track of them so I don't have to. That's one of the principles of David
Allen's Getting Things Done,
but it's something I started doing long before he wrote the book.

I developed my own version of GTD in the 1980's when I inherited the
highly dysfunctional service department of an electronics manufacturer.
It was explained to me by my employer's production manager thusly:
"Service is an evil, a necessary evil". I was shocked to hear
that, but soon came to understand why it was seen as a necessary evil
within the company. The department was chaotic in just about every way,
left behind a trail of dissatisfied customers, and had never in the
company's history operated at a profit. I brainstormed a system to bring
order to the chaos and transparency to the opacity, implemented as a
handful of manila folders and a magnetic whiteboard. There were, of
course, many other changes required, but the core of the system
consisted of the folders and whiteboard. Proving out my perception that
we had good people on staff, within a few months we had nothing past due
in our repair queue, our efficiency was greatly increased, and our
turnaround time greatly decreased. The technicians were happier, too,
because our system was predictable, easy to live with, and drove away
the unreasonable time pressures that had been a constant. At the close
of the fiscal year the CEO dropped by to congratulate me for being the
first one in the company's 20 year history to manage the service
department profitably.

Tangentially, turning the service department around proved to be the key
to making customer win-backs, too.

Monday, May 19 2014

My Logitech mouse was giving me fits with click-and-drag operations, as
when selecting ("highlighting") text to copy, as if it was
releasing the button despite my having ample and consistent pressure on
the actuator. Apparently the most common Logitech mouse button problem
is erroneous double-clicks, but I was only rarely experiencing those.
The fix for that can be found
here, and is the
reference for the rest of this brief article.

The requisite caveats: If your mouse is under warranty, give the problem
to Logitech. If you proceed with this fix, you risk breaking your mouse,
and the fix might not work anyway. There may be other failures that mimic
the one described here. You may be bitten by a radioactive spider but not
be transformed into Spiderman. Or you might win a lottery jackpot. Such
is life.

If your Logitech mouse button is foiling your attempts to copy text
because it's apparently releasing the button, but is not suffering the
double-click failure, this fix is easier than is the one for the well
known double-click failure. Disassemble the mouse as far as opening the
switch as in the article above, but do not remove the copper reed.
Instead, cut a couple of strips of printer paper a few inches in length
and about ¼" in width. Insert the first small strip of paper
between the contacts, which are at the front end of the reed, the end
furthest from the battery. Gently close the switch (depress the reed)
with a small screwdriver, a pen, pencil, or even a fingertip, and drag
the paper through the contacts. Repeat this closing/dragging operation
several times, then repeat with the other, clean strip of paper. Then,
partially reassemble the mouse with two or three screws, install the
batteries, and test. If it proves to be working nicely again as mine is,
finish buttoning it up and be happy — you've just saved yourself
right around fifty bucks. If instead it's still a bit twitchy, try another
clean strip of paper and a bit more cleaning. If that doesn't work, be
happy but try some other fix, or replacing the recalcitrant rodent.

A side note: The switch enclosure I encountered was slightly different
from the one in the referenced article, in that the locking tabs were
on the sides rather than the ends. It's not a big thing, but you should
look at the one you encounter carefully, and proceed more carefully. If
you apply the correct pressure in the correct place, the cover should
come away easily. You don't want to hear the wrong snapping noise!

I recommend a contact cleaning if you're in there to fix the infamous
double-click failure, too.

I think I'm going to spend the next few minutes just randomly
highlighting text to see it working properly.

Thursday, June 20 2013

I was recently compelled to upgrade my workstation from Debian GNU/Linux
6 to 7 ("Wheezy"). I'd gone along happily for years with
Gnome2 and Compiz. Compiz was removed from Debian Wheezy for what may or
may not be perfectly valid reasons, and Gnome3 replaces Gnome2. I was
unhappy about both of these things, but I've got Gnome3 on my netbook
and haven't yet thrown it out the window so it seemed worthy of an open
minded trial.

The trial lasted all of one evening. Gnome3 sucks. I could not get past
the feeling that Gnome3 is just about what Windows For Workgroups 3.11
would have become if the interface paradigm were not abandoned. Please
allow me to explain:

UPDATE 2015/02/10:
I really hate to say it, but AVX falls flat on its face in
Android 5.n Lollipop and it appears that the developer has lost interest
in the project. It's a real shame, as AVX still would do far more than
Google Now and I hate being without it, but whatcha gonna do?